Imagination claims to have come up with a different sort of security system which it says is not CPU centric.

It claims that such a security method offer only a binary approach where there is a one secure zone and one non-secure zone. They are also complicated to implement in software and cannot address the sophisticated types of applications and services being enabled by next-generation connected devices and the cloud.

Imagination claims to have set up a system that encapsulates not only the CPU but also other elements in a chip such as graphics and connectivity. It also ensures that secure applications are completely isolated from each other as well as protected from non-secure applications, while still meeting required levels of functionality, performance, cost, and power consumption.

Omnishield also creates multiple secure domains, where multiple secure/non-secure applications/operating systems can operate independently in their own separate environments. Basically it is taking advantage of MIPS CPUs and PowerVR GPUs.

The war of words between Imagination and ARM is starting to become more colourful with the head of Imagination Technologies dubbing his rival a "big gorilla ."

Hossein Yassaie has accused ARM Holdings of exploiting its monopoly for chip designs that power the world's electronic devices.

What is interesting is that both companies are British and both seem to be headed on a collision course.

Imagination moved into ARM's heartland of producing central processing units (CPUs) for devices such as smartphones when it bought MIPS, of the United States, two years ago. It is better known for its PowerVR mobile graphics processors which are under the bonnet of the iPhones and MIPSembedded microprocessors.

But Hossein playing the monopoly card appears to be setting his company up as the little guy trying to take on a bigger rival.

Imagination Technologies announced the Warrior architecture in 2013 and was expected to push MIPS' reach from embedded devices like routers and into smartphones and tablets. Nothing happened and Yassaie thinks it will take a big MIPS design win to get his outfit's foot in the door.

He said that he had to keep such releases to himself because everytime Imagination makes an announcement ARM tends to focus on it.

Hossein has stated before that that ARM has managed to get where it is because it ran a monopoly but with MIPS it has that.

MIPS is getting traction, particularly from the likes of Google supporting 64-bit MIPS chips in Android L but it still has a long way to go.

ARM dominates the mobile SOC market, and Intel is fast becoming the second player in that market with its x86 designs like its Core M and Cherry Trail Atom. If anything Intel has more monopoly experience than ARM meaning that Imagination has to tackle an actual monopoly and someone who is used to establishing one.

What it will have to do is come up with a decent pricing strategy to kill off the rivals once and for all.

Several years of fighting between Intel and Apple over the future of chip designer Imagination Technologies has ended with Intel giving up.

Intel, who is Imagination’s biggest shareholder, announced it was selling overnight a 9 per cent stake in the company held by its venture capital arm. The sale will cut Intel’s holding in Imagination to about 4 per cent. It was not as if Imagination was doing badly. The company announced that it was making a fortune in new licensing deals both for smartphones and new products.

In fact is probably because Imagination is doing so well that Intel felt it was safe to off-load the shares. The shareprice was double what Intel paid for it and the chipmaker was laughing all the way to the bank having lost nothing on the deal. The US chipmaker had built its stake in 2009 as an apparent move to block potential bids from rivals such as Apple, Imagination’s biggest customer, which still has an 8.6 per cent holding.

Intel made it clear that it continues to have a business relationship with the company, having licensed several generations of Imagination Technologies' graphics and video processing cores.

Imagination Technologies has announced new Series 6XT and Series 6XE GPUs and the IP appears to be ready for licensing. The original Series 6 (Rogue) was announced two years ago, but we’re just starting to see the first SoCs with Series 6 graphics. Apple of course led the way with the A7 SoC, which is said to feature PowerVR G6430 graphics with four clusters.

The nature announcement and lack of new features leads us to believe that the XT series is a refresh of the original 6-series. The new GPUs feature a GX prefix and so far four parts have been announced, the GX 6240, GX6250, GX6450 and GX6650. The last two are the most interesting. The GX6450 appears to be a four-cluster design, much like the G6430 used in Apple’s latest SoC. The GX6650 sounds like a tweaked G6630 with six clusters.

The XE series is designed for cost-sensitive, mass market applications – in other words it was designed to save die space. Imagination says the XE family is the smallest fully featured Open GL ES 3.0 and OpenCL capable GPU core to date. In addition to low-end phones and tablets, the XE series should find its way into wearables, set-top boxes and other devices.

The XE series consists of four parts. The G6050 is the smallest one – it doesn’t even have a single cluster and Imagination is describing it as a “half-cluster” design. It is designed for entry level phones and wearables. The G6060 is similar, but it adds lossless PVRIC2 image compression, making it suitable for TVs, tablets and set top boxes.

The G6100 is an update of the original single-cluster Rogue core, while the G6110 is also a single-cluster design with PVRIC2 support. The addition of PVRIC makes it suitable for low-cost 4K/UHD TV sets and high resolution tablets.

Of course, since we are dealing with mobile GPUs, the announcement does not mean you will start seeing SoCs with the new cores anytime soon. It took almost two years to deploy the original Rogue cores and they are just hitting the market in actual products. Since the XE and XT series are not entirely new, adoption might be somewhat faster, but we probably won’t see any products for 12 to 18 months.

Although the pace of new rollouts in the mobile GPU space tends to be slow, it should be noted that competition is heating up. Nvidia has a new 192-core Kepler derived GPU for the new Tegra and it will start licensing Maxwell IP. ARM is making a lot of noise about upcoming Mali parts and Apple is rumoured to be working on a custom GPU of its own. Unfortunately AMD is still not in the running, but Qualcomm’s Adreno parts still have plenty of ATI DNA to go around.

TSMC and Imagination Technologies announced the next step in their tech collaboration in an effort to develop Imagination’s next generation PowerVR 6-series GPUs.

The new GPUs are still not ready for prime time, but they should be used in future SoC designs, including those stamped out using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. The two companies will work to create new reference system designs, utilizing high bandwidth memory standards and TSMC’s 3D IC technology.

As GPU muscle becomes more important for next generation SoCs, designers need more advanced and more complex processes, such as TSMC’s 16FinFET.

“Through advanced projects initiated under this partnership, Imagination and TSMC are working together to showcase how SoCs will transform the future of mobile and embedded products,” said Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination.

TSMC VP Cliff Hou argued that the need for high performance mobile GPUs will drive silicon processes in the future, much in the same way CPU development pushed new processes in the nineties.

Futuremark has just announced that its own Benchmark Development Program, the initiative behind the upcoming 3DMark benchmark for Android-based devices, has just been joined by some big players including Intel, Acer, Qualcomm and SingTel-Optus.

Jukka Mäkinen, Futuremark CEO noted that they are quite excited to see an expansion of cooperation with such big names in order to develop 3DMark for Android and make sure that it lives up to industry standard seen with 3DMark and PCMark on the PC side.

In case you missed, the upcoming 3DMark for Android will measure gaming performance using graphics rendering, CPU and physics test with real-time graphics that will OpenGL ES2.0 to the limit. The results of the 3DMark for Android will be comparable to results from the upcoming new 3DMark for Windows.

Acer, Intel, Qualcomm and SingTel-Optus will join the rest of the members that already include some big names like AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Imagination Technologies and Microsoft.

Both the 3DMark for Android and the 3DMark for Windows are scheduled for later this year and by the looks of things it will have a great support from some major players in the industry.

You can check out more details about Futuremark's Benchmark Development Program here.

We already wrote that AMD is preparing a couple of big announcements during its AMD Fusion Developer Summit, and the non-profit consortium between AMD, ARM, Imagination, MediaTek and Texas Instruments known as the Heteogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, is apparently just a start of big things to come.

In case you missed it, the AMD Fusion Developer Summit is currently being held at Bellevue, WA. According to AMD, The HSA Foundation is a non-profit consortiom established to define and promote an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing that will provide a common hardware specification and broad support ecosystem to make it easer for software developers to deliver innovative applications that can take greater advantage of today's modern processors.

AMD, ARM, Imagination Technlogoies, MediaTek and Texas Instruments are the initial founding members of the HSA Foundation but there has been an indication or two that more companies will surely follow. The main goal of the HSA Foundation is the actual standardizing of the heterogeneous programming model so developers could easily and cost-effectively develop new software that will take advantage of the US $55.5B processor market and take greater advantage of capabilities found in modern CPUs and GPUs, or in AMD's case APUs.

The HSA Foundation will surely put some pressure on Intel. You can check out more about HSA Foundation here.